Using Schema.org and Micro Data to Boost You Google Places Rankings

One of the most underutilized secrets in the world of local SEO is the influence of micro-data and schema.org encoding on Google Places rankings. If you don’t work in SEO you are thinking to yourself, huh? What the heck is this kid talking about? Fair enough – let’s start from the most logical place; the beginning.

Local SEO; what is it?

Local SEO is the process of optimizing a Google Places listing so that it appears at the top of Google’s results pages for keyword queries with local intent. For instance, if you live in Colorado Springs and you want to find a local roofer, you would search ‘Colorado Springs Roofer’, or something similar. If you own a roofing business in Colorado Springs, you would want your company’s Google Places listing to be displayed on the first page for these queries, for obvious reasons.

So, how is this type of optimization accomplished? What indicators does Google use to determine what listings should be ranked the highest on the page? The primary and most important indicator is the number of instances of the businesses NAP (name, address, and phone number) appearing across the web. The simple term for this is a citation. Google’s web crawlers like to see many citations for a given business as an indicator that the business is well established and popular.

How Micro Data and Schema.org encoding Communicate With Google’s Crawlers

Getting citations from trusted sites such as Judy’s Book, Manta and Yelp are great for establishing your business as a legitimate one, and one that Google should consider when rankings local businesses for relevant search queries. But what makes these citations particularly impactful is that they automatically encode your businesses NAP in mirco data, which makes Google’s job of determining relevance very easy. Here is an example of what a business citation in Yelp looks like to Google:

This is an example of micro data encoding. The words that I have placed in a red box are actually communicating directly to Google’s crawlers, saying “hey, this is a ‘street address’; this is a ‘postal code’; and this is a ‘telephone number’. Compare that with a business listing which is not encoded using micro data:

While Google’s crawler is still seeing the business citation, which is a positive ranking factor, it is not as influential as the Yelp citation, which specifies using the micro data coding exactly what the information relates to.

Schema.org encoding:

Schema.org encoding is relatively new, but it is proving to be a powerful local SEO tool. Here is an example of what that coding looks like in Google’s robotic eyes:

The same idea applies here; by using this encoding you are literally holding Google’s hand as it crawls your business information, telling it exactly what it is looking at.

How to Use Schema.org and Micro data to Boost your Google Places Rankings

When it comes to external websites listing your business, there is really no way to make sure they are using micro data or Schema.org encoding. However, you can, and should implement them on your own website. Here’s how:

Micro Data:

1. Go to http://microformats.org/code/hcard/creator and enter your business information, exactly how it appears in your Google Places listing.
2. The creator will spit out the html code in micro data format
3. Copy the code and paste it into your website. To get the most out of it, paste the code onto the page that your Google Places listing links to. In other words, if you have a specific page on your website for your location, and you have that page in your Google Places listing, paste the code there.

Schema.org

1. Go to http://schema-creator.org/organization.php and enter your business information, exactly how it appears in your Google Places listing.
2. The creator will spit out the html code in micro data format
3. Copy the code and paste it into your website, just as I explined above.

For further information on how micro data and schema.org encoding affect Google Places rankings, check out this awesome post by Mike Ramsey.

The Biggest Thing in Local Search Since the Upside-down Tear Drop is a post from: Technshare

Look for the long ... tail (Photo: audi_insperation)

It’s not a secret that search engine optimization is a very cunning and complicated craft. The actions you take in order to give your web resource more publicity may either result in having it highly promoted and indexed by search engines, or downgraded or even banned because of an incorrectly chosen strategy. That is why a growing number of webmasters now specialize in new SEO methods meant to facilitate the process of promotion and making in more productive. In fact, the search engine results given to a specific request are based on the keywords provided by internet users while searching the necessary information. These keywords can be classified into 2 categories: short tail keywords (2-3 words maximum) and long tail keywords (3 words or more). Some webmasters specializing in SEO find it reasonable to utilize the keywords targeted to potential customers, who usually tend to be “late” in the buying cycle. That’s why focusing on long tail keywords is being considered as a quick and easy way of getting traffic to your website.

How Do Long Tail Keywords Work?

Long tail keywords are generally the core phrases consisting of 3 or more words that describe products or services offered by the given website. The practice shows that long tail searches  result in more sales compared with shorter general searches that are made before the buying decision.  After promoting a website dealing with online loans for 2 years, I finally figured out that people looking for some specific type of loan typically searched something like 1500 no credit check loans online, rather than a simple “online loan”.

The Importance Of Correct Targeting

For justice’ sake, I must say that some SEO specialists strongly doubt about the benefits of long tail keywords, considering that they don’t bring enough traffic to the optimized resources. However, I think that these kinds of keywords do have one major advantage. There is less competition if compared with using standard, short tail keywords. Thus, appearing on the first page of search engine results with long tail keywords becomes much easier. It goes without saying that long tail keywords themselves won’t bring you the desired results if you use them as a standalone solution. However, they can help you get inexpensive traffic if a number of them are properly targeted.

Before You Start Keyword Targeting

It will also be necessary to design additional pages for your website in order to properly target the long tail keywords.  Luckily, Google values multiple-page websites, because it makes a website look more readable and visible for search engines.

Why Long Tail Keywords Bring Good Traffic is a post from: Technshare

Don't get bitten by the Panda (Photo: Phan Ly)

Did you see a significant drop in your website’s traffic around February last year? If so, chances are you were hit by Google’s Panda update, which acted as  a quality filter and was aimed at reducing the amount of spammy content appearing in the search results.

Since Google’s original release of Panda, there have been various iterations, each trying to further refine the sites which are affected, as many legitimate sites were originally hit without knowingly doing anything manipulative.

Because of this, it’s important all webmasters are aware of what types of issues on their site could create Panda problems and, if they do suffer, what they can do to recover:

What Makes Your Site Vulnerable to Panda?

• A lack of original, unique content
• A large amount of duplicate content (internal or external)
• A high % of pages with low quality content, even if your top pages are highly rated
• Lots of adverts
• Unnatural use of a word or phrase on the page, i.e. keyword stuffing
• Low quality links pointing at the site
• The content on the page and/or title tag not matching search
• Low amount of time spent on the page or site as a whole

What Should You Do If the Panda Bites You?

Locate the Problem

• Find pages which have been worst hit
• Identify what affected pages are doing which others are not
• Test changes on those pages

Eradicate the Issues

• Take the issues and pages you have highlighted and work through them to remove the problems
• Remove low quality pages and consolidate the site so every page is doing a job and worthwhile
• Write unique content for pages which have duplicate content
• Edit over optimised pages so they are targeted at a user rather than a search engine
• Try to add different forms of content; images, videos etc

Promote Your Site

• Once you’ve corrected the on-site issues which may be annoying the big bad Panda, it’s time to move your focus to promoting your newly streamlined site
• Promote content on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+
• Reach out to blogs in your niche and ask if you can contribute content to their sites in order to generate higher quality links

Once you’ve been through this process, it’s unlikely that you’ll immediately recover the traffic lost originally, but don’t be discouraged! Once sites have corrected all Panda-related issues, they then have to wait until the next iteration of the update, at which point Google will judge whether you have overcome the issues. If you’ve done enough to ‘untrip’ the switch you flicked to get struck by Panda, then you should see you traffic start to climb back to where it was originally.

The Panda Update has caused a lot of webmasters a lot headaches, but if you think you’ve been hit it’s worth taking the time to run through the points highlighted above. As well as recovering traffic, it’s more than likely you’ll come out the other side with a better site for users which has the potential to convert better.

Beat the Panda: How SEOs Can Combat Google’s Panda Update is a post from: Technshare

Don't rely on just one anchor (Photo: ezioman)

Varying your anchor text is essential for search engine rankings.  You can’t simply link to your site using your keyword for anchor text over and over again and expect every single link to count a lot.  The truth is that the days of exact match anchor text are over.

You will attain stronger rankings by dropping the exact match obsession that is so prevalent.  You don’t have to avoid exact match completely, but the majority of your links should use some sort of variation.

Here’s a short tutorial for anchor text variation backlinking techniques.

Variation Technique #1 – Using Synonyms

The first technique you can use to vary your anchor text is to use synonyms.  Using synonyms will allow you to use extremely similar long tail anchor text without using exact match.  For instance, for the keyword phrase “cheap dog training” could instead be changed to “affordable canine classes”.  This will make for a very relevant link to your site and also help your page rank for synonym terms.

To find synonyms for your keyword phrase, don’t just leave it up to your own imagination.  You can actually search directly through Google.  All you have to do is select one term from your keyword and search for it with a tilde (~) in front of it like this:

All of the bolded words are counted as synonyms.  This way you will find all of the obvious ones, but also some you may not have considered that Google uses.

Tip: Use the gear in the top-right corner in Google to change your search settings and allow for 20+ results to quickly scan the results for your synonyms.

Variation Technique #2 – Partial Match

Many top SEOs believe that partial match is more effective for gaining rankings these days.  Partial match anchor text is when you use some but not all of your terms when linking.  For example, if your keyword is “social media tips and tricks” then a few examples of partial match would be:

-social media tips

-social media tricks

-tips for social media

-tips and tricks

-use social media more effectively

All of these variations contain a few of the words from the original keyword.  There’s no golden rule here, just switch it up and add in other terms on occasion to appear more natural.

Variation Technique #3 – Related search Results

This last strategy isn’t completely reliable, but works often times.  All you have to do is go to Google and search for your keyword.  After the results come up, scroll to the bottom of the page to find related searches generated for you by Google:

In my opinion, these are pretty obvious examples to use for your anchor text.  Google is plainly telling you that these are searches that are often used with your term.  In other words, they’re extremely relevant.  Some of them may not always be usable, for example, there are some product names here.  Regardless, it is still a useful technique for finding some new variations.

Tip: If you don’t get any related searches, shorten your keyword phrase by a word or two and search again.

By varying your anchor text effectively you will not only gain stronger rankings in the search engines, but you will also increase your overall visibility.  Rather than just ranking for your specific keyword, you will also be helping your rankings for your related terms and partial match phrases.  This means more organic search traffic for the same effort.

Anchor Text Variation for Link Building is a post from: Technshare

What SEO tools do you use? (Photo: Cellular Immunity)

It’s important for a website owner to know how their site is doing with SEO and visitors. If you read SEO blogs on a regular basis, you have probably encountered some posts about free SEO reporting tools quite often. I have selected 5 of what I think are most useful SEO online reporting tools on the web. I created this list as a resource that people can go to learn or to make sure they are doing it right.

5 Free SEO Reporting Tools is a post from: Technshare

Stay ahead of your competition (Photo: davedehetre)

Search Engine Optimization is an old term that has evolved a huge amount over the last decade.  Making a site both user and search engine friendly can be difficult, but keeping up with what actually works can be even harder.

Not that long ago SEO used to focus simply on backlinks and on-page optimization these simpler times are now long gone however, backlinks are loaded with metrics to determine their value, and social interaction can play a role in the value of your content, not just your online appearance.

The good news is that there are three relatively unused sources of information which can help keep you up to date with the latest SEO knowledge.  Keeping up to date not only means that you can stay ahead of Google, but it also means you can stay one step ahead of your competitors.  If you get fresh search engine information quickly you can often beat your competitors easily in the rankings if you update quickly.

Three Tips to Stay Knowledgeable on SEO

Search Engine Optimization is an old term that has evolved a huge amount over the last decade.  Making a site both user and search engine friendly can be difficult, but keeping up with what actually works can be even harder.

Not that long ago SEO used to focus simply on backlinks and on-page optimization these simpler times are now long gone however, backlinks are loaded with metrics to determine their value, and social interaction can play a role in the value of your content, not just your online appearance.

The good news is that there are three relatively unused sources of information which can help keep you up to date with the latest SEO knowledge.  Keeping up to date not only means that you can stay ahead of Google, but it also means you can stay one step ahead of your competitors.  If you get fresh search engine information quickly you can often beat your competitors easily in the rankings if you update quickly.

Google Webmaster Blog

The first thing you really need to follow is the Google Webmaster Blog.  Google will never tell you everything they do, but occasionally they will let slip about some ranking factors which may help you optimize your site just a little bit more than everyone else. Google Webmaster Blog is an official Google resource, which means you don’t have to worry about the usual swathes of misinformation that permeate many SEO websites. A good example will be the lowered impact of backlinks that have matching anchor text and title tags.  Small snippets of information like this can give you a huge advantage.

Usenet

The second tip is a little unusual.  Usenet is a great place to find up-to-date information on SEO.  Despite the age of Usenet, over ten years older than the World Wide Web, it is still going strong, and is heavily used by some of the most tech savvy internet professionals, including the best Internet Marketers.

Doing a Usenet search is not always easy, but using one of the best Usenet provider services can vastly simplify the process with an all-in-one Usenet search and newsgroup reader application. This powerful combination allows you to quickly find the very latest SEO information before the rest of the web. If you are not sure what Usenet actually is, there is a great Usenet guide out there to help you understand it!

Social Media

My third and final suggestion is social media.  Okay, there is a lot of trash info on there too, but focus your following on high brand reputable SEO resources, chances are you will see at least three or four interesting SEO topics every single day which may help improve your SEO campaigns.

These three information sources are often overlooked, but they are all amazing ways to keep completely up to date on the latest SEO practices and information before everybody else gets to hear about it.

Staying at the Cutting Edge of SEO is a post from: Technshare

See images in a new light (Source: Google)

They say it is better to see once than to hear 100 times. That is why most websites make use of visuals at least to some extent.  There are also certain types of sites (stock photography sites or photography blogs) that CONSIST primarily of images. For such websites, ranking highly in Google Images is often the only way to get Web traffic.

In this post, I’m going to dwell on optimizing images for Google’s Image Search. And, let us begin with the most important issues.

Alt text

When posting an image to your site, create an alt text for it. What’s alt text? “Alt”stands for “alternative”, and it is basically the textual representation of your image. Search engines cannot read images, thus, they judge by the alt text to figure out what’s in your picture.

Alt text is intended for situations when the image on the page cannot be loaded (to give users an idea about your pic). It also benefits visually impaired people who use special programs to surf the Web, in which case the app will read out the alt text.

Be smart about your alt text. What does this mean? Say, there is a picture of the ocean that you took on the morning of November 4^th. So, instead of calling it “the pic I took on November 4^th“, call it “ocean view” or similar. Using your main keywords in the alt text is vital.

Context

The context in which your image stands is also of great importance. Google’s image bot is believed to first look at your alt text and then match it to the rest of the text on your page. Thus, make sure these are related.

A good illustration of the image-context connection would be this. Some time ago, I wrote a blog post on how to create killer landing pages. The post had 2 images, one of which had an alt text that read “convertible airplane landing”, and the other one was called “landing page scheme”. Now, when I look up “landing page scheme” on Google Images, I get both images in the search results:

As you see, both images rank for this key phrase. This means Google DOES use context to decide what picture is relevant for the query.

Image URL

You probably know about the importance of having an SEO-friendly URL structure on your site. What I’m talking about is that, instead of having dynamic URLs that look something like this:

www.example.com/showitem.php?category=34&item=146,

it’s better to create static URLs that look something like this:

swww.example.com/kitchenware/electric-kettle.html

Same is recommended for image URLs. An SEO-friendly image URL would be:

example.com/books/science-fiction/citizen-of-the-galaxy.jpg

Many SEO’s believe that Google also looks at your image URL to determine whether your picture is relevant for a particular keyword.

Image size

There is no ideal image size described anywhere in Google’s Guideline. However, it’s been noticed, that images sized from 300×200 to 1200×900 pixels tend to perform the best. The general rule that applies here is that the image should be neither too big, nor too small, otherwise Google will consider them inconvenient for the users to view.

Besides, as far as the image’s width and height is concerned, 4:3 is considered to be the optimum ratio, since, if you look at an average Google Images results page, most images will be 4:3. If your image is, like, 5:1, Google will most likely crop it to display in the SERPs.

Indexing

Another important thing to do is to make sure that your picture is not restricted from indexing with a robots.txt file or similar. Also, the more often you upload new images to your site, the more frequently Google image bot will stop by.

It also helps to add your images to the XML sitemap. This way they will get indexed faster and will not be overlooked by the search engines.

Internal and external linking

Ok, let us clear up what you are supposed to do in regards to linking from and to your images. As far as internal linking is concerned, it definitely helps to link your images to other pages on your site (just as it is the case with interlinking webpages). For instance, you can link your image to your picture gallery. While doing that, pay attention to the image’s title (it kind of works like an anchor text, but does not have that much of an impact).

As for external linking, Google does not seem to rely on incoming links to your picture as much as it relies on backlinks when ranking webpages. To get an idea about your image’s authority, Google reportedly looks at something we’re just about to discuss – hotlinks.

To allow or to disallow hotlinking?

Hotlinking is linking to somebody else’s content, so that the users visiting your site can load the piece of content DIRECTLY from the original poster’s server. For example, if you embed a YouTube video on your blog, the video itself will be located on a YouTube server, while it will be possible to view it without leaving your blog. All in all, hotlinking is considered unethical, as it steals one’s bandwidth.

Benefits

Images get hotlinked a lot. But, although hotlinking may appear evil, in the case of images it does have certain benefits. If you watermark your images, each hotlink will also serve to promote your site/brand. In addition, as I said earlier, Google seems to take hotlinks into account while ranking images in the SERPs.

Risks

In some situation, however, hotlinking may have a DETRIMENTAL EFFECT on your site and image rankings. For example, if your image is big and gets hotlinked many times, this may lead to a major bandwidth leek, and you’d definitely not want that to happen.

Besides, when Google sees many hotlinks to one and the same image, it has to decide which one of them to represent in the search results. It may even consider a hotlink sitting on somebody else’s site more relevant than your original picture, if it finds that site’s content keyword-richer or more relevant than yours.

Another possible risk is that, if the safe search filter (meant to close off adult and some other content) is applied to some site that hotlinks to your picture, the same filter will get applied to your image as well.

That said, when deciding on your hotlinking policy, weigh all the pros and cons as applied to your site. (1) Check your access logs and see if hotlinks are taking up too much of your bandwidth. (2) Check your rankings and see if anybody else is outranking you for YOUR images in the SERPs. (3) Make sure no safe search filter is applied to your pics.

And, if none of the points I’ve just mentioned hold true for your site, you may as well allow hotlinking. Just make sure Google’s bot requests for images are not blocked as part of the collateral damage.

>Bonus tip – stand out of the crowd!

Ok, one thing I’d like to leave you with is my idea of how you can conduct some competition research (probably prior to your Image Search SEO campaign) in regards to images. Look up your main keywords on Google Images and see how you could make your images stand out. Consider the following example below:

An outstanding image means more clicks and (as many SEO’s believe) higher rankings in the Image SERPs.

Know some other Images SEO master tricks? Do share!

Google Image Search: How to SEO-Optimize Images to Get Higher Rankings is a post from: Technshare

Boost Your Ranking (Photo: dannysullivan)

Google is the No.1 Search Engine without any doubt, but are you spending time to increase your search ranking on Google?  In my experience, many blogs get 75%+ of their niche traffic from Google Organic Search.  This is critical to understand how to maximize and get the most of it.  Here are some easy ways to increase your Google search ranking:

Page Rank

Page Rank plays a very important role on Google’s search ranking. Start by checking your website page rank on Prchecker.info.  You need to take care of your Page Rank.  By achieving a minimum of Page Rank (PR) 3, you’ll be ahead of most sites.  As a point of reference Technshare.com is a PR4 site.  The following will help with page rank.

Quality Content

Write quality and unique content.  Don’t try to write for the search engine; instead write for your readers.  By mixing good content with good keywords and images – good organic results will follow.  Try to write lengthy,  minimum 400+ word articles.

Quality Back links

When you receive a back links you get the benefit of more traffic from that link as well as a better search ranking.  Try to get quality back links from industry leading sites that have a high PR.  Blog commenting and guest posting are just 2 ways support this approach.   You must be living under a rock if you haven’t realized that this website encourages everyone to write a guest post and will help you leverage its PR4.

Do Keyword Research 

Keyword Research is very important to get a steady stream of traffic from Google.  Focus your attention on the long tail – that is low competition keywords.  I stick to keywords that related to my niche using Google keyword Tool.

Use On-Page SEO

On page SEO is the process of optimizing the content of your website. This includes the text, images and links on your website. Use below tips to write Search engine friendly articles.

• Use H1,H2,H3 tags
• Your main keyword must be placed in the title tag 2 times
• Your main keyword must be placed in your meta description 2 times
• Your main keyword phrase must appear in the in H1, H2 and H3 Tags
• Italic, bold your main keywords (but don’t go crazy)
• Use alt tags for images
• Write lengthy article

 Submit Your Sitemap 

Create a site map that tells people where everything is on your site.  Use Google Webmaster tools to submit your sitemap to Google. WordPress users are able to use a simple WordPress plugin that called as “Google XML sitemaps.”

Blog Promotion

Promotion is very important to attract traffic to your blog.  I prefer to focus on article marketing. Article Marketing works well to  boost Google search ranking fast for me.  Here are a couple of last tips to promote your blog:

• Write Articles On Article Directories
• Submit Your Articles To Social Bookmarking Sites
• Comment On Do follow blog in Your Niche
• Join Forum Discussions

Golden Ways To Increase Your Google Search Ranking is a post from: Technshare